Why is US spelling different from UK spelling?

Question

As in Colour without a U? I'm not debating the merits or anything. Just curious.

Answer 1

Because they want thier own language to be recognised, they dont want to speak English they want to speak American

Answer 2

Benjamin Franklin championed spelling reform in the US after independence from England in the late 18th century. He believed in the importance of a well-educated citizenry, and that reforming spelling to remove some of the irregularities of English would make this easier to achieve. The chief architect of the actual changes made was Noah Webster.

However, as you may have noticed, the changes that were actually made were very minor, and made no significant difference to ease of learning. They were aimed more at making American English "different", for political purposes, while not being significant enough to be difficult to introduce. Many of the changes were to word endings, which don't get a lot of attention when we are reading. For example, -ise to -ize, -our to -or, -re to -er. In some cases redundant final letters were dropped, such as programme to program, traffick to traffic (this and several similar changes were also adopted in England).

The overall effect was to make it easy to recognise whether a writer was American, rather than British (important in the exciting times of new independence), while not making it so different that communication with other users of English would become difficult.

In recent times, some of the different forms have travelled back across the Atlantic (although "traveled" hasn't travelled yet!). In England, an IT expert writes a "program" for a computer during the day, for example, then buys a "programme" at the theatre (not the theater) in the evening.

Answer 3

American English has many spelling differences from English as used elsewhere (especially British English), some of which were made as part of an attempt to make more rational the spelling used in Britain at the time.

Answer 4

Doctor Johnson produced the first English dictionary, which "standardised" the spelling of words in the English language. Prior to that, words were spelled in different ways, as there was no standardisation.

However, the Doctor Johnson dictionary, was published in England, not in the American colonies, and so it was left to Webster to produce the first English dictionary in America, and he used spellings that were likely to have been common over there at the time.

I guess, in each case, the authors would have adopted spellings that were contemporary in their territory.

Answer 5

In a nutshell Americans changed the spellings to make them easier for new learners to spell, it tends to be simpler than the british way of spelling.

Answer 6

It is not just in USA.

There are many other countries with english speaking population who spell same words differently.

Answer 7

Because Noah Webster decided to improve on British spelling when he created his dictionary in 1828.

Answer 8

A good question. And why do the writers in the U.K. and Canada use different punctuation methods, particularly the use of quotation marks, than what American writers use?

Answer 9

In the 1700's there was a movement to rationalise / simplify the spelling of some constructs within words (e.g. "...our" to "...or" etc.).

Whilst this never really took-off in Britain, it found favour (or favor) in America.

Answer 10

Because they can! In fact it would have been more logical to have removed the two O's and spelt it Culur or Cullur. Then at least it could be passed of as phonetic !

Answer 11

Maybe because dialects change as they seperate from the mother. It's the same between European Spanish and the Amercia's Spanish.